Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Professor Doom Watches Vaxxed…

By Professor Doom

For those not in
the know, Vaxxed is a documentary on “possible” problems with vaccinations. I
have to admit, I’d been looking forward to this documentary for a while. It’s
on Amazon, with little fanfare.

Before I talk
about what it does say, let me address what it doesn’t say: there’s absolute
proof of a vaccine-autism link. In fact, it doesn’t even address, medically
speaking, how such a link might exist. That said, it does have some relevant
things in it.

The documentary
begins with snippets of media hysteria about the measles outbreak at Disney a
few years back, affecting a hundred
or so people. While as good a start as any, they should have supplemented this
with an important detail: around
100,000 kids a year are being diagnosed with autism…it was
much closer to zero just a few decades ago. Vaxxed does mention that if the
increase continues, some 80% of males will be autistic in a few decades …I’m
pretty sure we’ll have rioting in the streets before then, so I don’t put much
faith in this projection.

Later in the
show, Vaxxed runs another story, which I think they should have started with:

In 1987,
Smith-Kline Beecham (SKB) released a vaccine in Canada. This vaccine, Triverix,
caused meningitis.The meningitis outbreak
was so bad they quickly stopped giving the vaccine in Canada.

Now, SKB had a
choice: they could lose money, or sell the damned vaccine elsewhere.
Corporations are all about money, so SKB changed the vaccine name to Pluserix,
and sold the vaccine in the UK. Again with the meningitis outbreak, and again,
they had to stop selling the vaccine there.

Now, SKB had a
choice: they could lose money, or sell the twice-damned vaccine elsewhere. No
surprise, they then sold the vaccine in Brazil. Again it caused a meningitis
epidemic in a mass vaccination campaign. These events are established fact.

Vaxxed doesn’t
reinforce the point here, but I will:

When
faced with a choice between not making kids sick, and making money, a
corporation will make money. I’m not criticizing corporations here, and
I say this with the same inflection I say “when faced with a choice between not
making kids sick, and sucking the juice from a fly, a spider will suck the
juice from a fly.” It’s just how things are, and so I’m very wary of trusting
corporations to take care of kids, unless they’ll lose money for doing it wrong.

“That’s
just a conspiracy theory,”

--A friend
high up in the FDA assured me there’s no such thing as a vaccine court, and
she’s supremely confident all vaccines are quite safe, always have been, always
will be. I have doubts, and she laughed hysterically when I expressed them. Too hysterically, truth be told.

Alas, there’s a
special vaccine court where taxpayers pay the damages of vaccinations gone
wrong, insulating vaccine-making companies from losing money if they make kids
sick.

This is a recipe
for disaster. I wish Vaxxed had outlined the implications here clearly, because
even if all vaccines today were proven to be perfectly safe for everyone,
having this type of insulation against loss would mean inevitably, a
corporation will choose to make more money over any safety concern (they
already must do so as matter of corporate policy, of course)—any safety
protocol would cost money, and that would impact the bottom line unnecessarily.

“But muh
polio!”

--a common
reply to any criticism of vaccines. It’s important to understand that just
because some vaccines are really good, that this shouldn’t be taken to mean all
vaccines are really good. I seldom seem to get this idea across when I try to
explain to people in person, however.

Vaxxed gives
plenty of anecdotes of parents who saw their kids degenerate into autism
shortly after receiving a particular vaccine: specifically the triple vaccine
MMR (for measles, mumps, and rubella). Now, I’m no big fan of anecdotes,
especially on a show with a clear agenda…but when literally tens of thousands of parents say the
same thing, I think it’s fair to ask the question about there being a
relationship here.

Autism rates are
skyrocketing. It used to be too rare to be even estimated, then 1 in 10,000 in
the early 1980s, but in the 90s (when this particular vaccine became very popular),
it skyrocketed. It was 1 in 68 five years ago. It’s 1 in
45 today, this rate of increase is VERY scary, that’s more than 2% of the
next generation, not so rare at all...we should be asking loud questions about
what our entire population is being exposed to in infancy, “coincidental to
vaccines,” to cause this. Vaxxed doesn’t address other possibilities besides
vaccines, but I’m quite willing to believe there are multiple reasons for this
frightening rise in the occurrence rate of an increasingly common lifelong
debilitating illness which barely existed in our past.

Vaxxed decorates
their story with damning recorded phone calls from a CDC whistleblower, Dr.
Thompson. He was part of “the big study” saying that absolutely, positively, no
way, no how, is there a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and that all
those parents have lying eyeballs. Dr. Thompson says the CDC cooked the data to
get that result of “no evidence.”

One of the CDC
workers responsible for the study is now very highly paid working for the
vaccine company protected by that study. There’s a conflict of interest here
which merits consideration, but Vaxxed doesn’t spend much time on it (to be
fair, it would take many hours to cover all these points)…they mention it, so
that’s something.

So what does
Vaxxed discuss? Mostly Vaxxed talks about statistical results from that data.

Before addressing
their result, I want to talk about statistics for a bit. The bulk of research
today is just statistical research. Some researcher makes a guess, gets some
data, then manipulates the data to confirm his result. Then it gets published.
Much of our “scientific” research published in the last 20 years or so is
bogus, which is why there’s a huge problem now as many
“scientific” results cannot replicated (close to half, it depends on the
field).

As something of a
statistician, I know full well how trivial it is to manipulate the data to say
what you want once ethics is abandoned…but you need not trust me when I say
this, since this manipulation is clearly what’s happening in our “research”
today.

So if the
whistleblower says the data has been manipulated, I believe him—at this point
I’d have to have collected the original data myself to believe the results of
any study. The whistleblower has been asked to testify before congress, but the CDC
won’t allow it. When the government acts this suspiciously, I’m inclined to
believe the worst.

“We did not prove an association
between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described. Virological
studies are underway that may help to resolve this issue.”

--from
Wakefield’s paper.

Vaxxed also
interviews Dr. Wakefield. Wakefield made and published a very small study
showing something bad about the MMR vaccine, and in the study he even concedes
that it was just a preliminary study suggesting more research, and encouraged
people to take individual vaccines (i.e., just the vaccine for measles, then
another for mumps, the another for rubella—the company responded to the rising
demand for this by refusing to offer the individual vaccines any more, as they
had loads of MMR vaccines to sell). Despite Wakefield’s own (justified)
reservations about his own study, his career was utterly destroyed and the
study repudiated by the journal which originally published it.

Again, perhaps it
was a bogus study (although, unlike many studies,
it can be replicated). But…half of the studies in those journals are bogus,
aren’t getting repudiated, and the researchers involved aren’t getting
destroyed. I have to ask: why was Wakefield singled out for a piffling study
that only suggested more study? Vaxxed doesn’t ask this question, alas.

Vaxxed claims that
they have the original data from the whistleblower, and one glaring detail in
this data is it shows a massive correlation between the MMR vaccine and its
effect on African-American males in particular (to be accurate, they show such
males to be more likely than others to get autism after getting the vaccine,
but bear with me for now).

One more time:
Vaxxed has evidence that African-American male infants are more likely to get
autism from vaccination than other races.

Now, wait just. One.
Minute.

Time and again I
hear talking heads on TV screeching about how blacks are being so oppressed in
this country, and it seems every week there’s another infinitesimal outrage that
reasonable people would ignore (hi Starbucks!). To some extent, I see their
point on some things, but here we have evidence
that blacks are literally being targeted for a lifelong debilitating
illness.

Where’s the
screaming in the media? Did I mention a hundred thousand kids a year get this
diagnosis? And somehow the media doesn’t see anything to cover here. Hmm.

Now, even though I
don’t have the data in front of me, I’m still going to trash this result, and
would even if I did have the data. Vaxxed doesn’t give me a p-value, which is a
number, hopefully small, which indicates how good the evidence is. Let’s
suppose this p-value is 0.0001—this is considered ridiculously strong evidence
(I’ve reviewed doctoral dissertations with p-values around 0.09, to put in
perspective how strong I’m assuming the evidence is).

And yet I’m
still suspicious of the result? Yes. See, this was a massive data set, and they
probably looked at hundreds of cross-variables. Not just “male” and “female”
but also “black,” “white,” “Hispanic,” “Asian,” all the other races. Now cross
reference with age of vaccination—3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, 15
months, etc. Now cross reference with prior illnesses and antibiotics use. All
those cross-references mean you’re looking at thousands of p-values. In this
circumstance, just on pure luck, you could easily get a p-value below 0.0001.
So as a professional statistician, I’m not convinced even with this p-value, at
least based on my understanding of the data set.

But that’s what a
skeptical statistician would say, and our media doesn’t think things through
nearly so clearly. I’ve seen the media go ape on much flimsier evidence
regarding poor treatment of black people. So, I’m forced to wonder why the
media silence here. Why is the possibly unjust shooting of one black adult male
(often with a criminal history) a huge deal, but this patently unfair damning of
many thousands of innocent black male infants not a problem at all?

My concerns about
this evidence aren’t relevant, however. There is a real hammer blow in Vaxxed
so powerful it not only smashes their dubious statistical evidence given above
into complete irrelevancy, but also completely annihilates the relevance of all
those studies which fail to show any connection between vaccines and other
ailments.